William Styron Quotes

Then I resolved that I would go back out there and somehow cope with the situation, despite the fact that I lacked a strategy and was frightened to the pit of my being.

Depression is a disorder of mood, so mysteriously painful and elusive in the way it becomes known to the self — to the mediating intellect — as to verge close to being beyond description.

And what else did Christianity accomplish?” he said. “Here’s what Christianity accomplished. Christianity accomplished the mob. The mob. It accomplished not only your senseless butchery, the extermination of all those involved in it, black and white, but the horror of lawless retaliation and reprisal — one hundred and thirty-one innocent niggers both slave and free cut down by the mob that roamed Southampton for a solid week, searching vengeance. I reckon you didn’t figure on that neither back then, did you, Reverend?

Numberless factors shape one's needs and longings.

This was not judgment day - only morning. Morning: excellent and fair.

Depression is a disorder of mood, so mysteriously painful and elusive in the way it becomes known to the self — to the mediating intellect — as to verge close to being beyond description. It thus remains nearly incomprehensible to those who have not experienced it in its extreme mode.

The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis, and we'd have mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a happy bunch of chuckleheads.

At any rate, during the few hours when the depressive state itself eased off long enough to permit the luxury of concentration, I had recently filled this vacuum with fairly extensive reading and I had absorbed many fascinating and troubling facts

I bought a bottle of old Grand-Dad bourbon; it was, I remember precisely, a full half pint, which was a prodigious amount of booze for a young man of twenty - at least, I know, for me. I got gloriously drunk on the Southern Railway local that rattled its way all night up through the Carolinas, gazing out at the bleak, moon-drenched wintry fields and happily pondered my deliverance. The chancellor, bless his soul, had really taken most of the curse off the bitter defeat I had initially felt there at the Biltmore. It really was better for me not to go to Oxford, I told myself, throwing in various Anglophilic injunctions: the food you wouldn't feed to a starving hound dog, the men were prancing homosexuals, the women all had foul breath, it was a moribund civilisation. "Screw Oxford," I remember saying aloud, and "Up yours, Cecil Rhodes!" Next year, instead of shivering to death in some library carrel, instead of - "Get this, old fellow!" I heard myself cackling - instead of writing a paper on the hexameters of Arthur Hugh Clough, that old Victorian nanny, I would be in New York, beginning my first novel.